Dirk Hartog
Dark Hartog, after whom the island was named, was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer who was born into a seafaring family in Amsterdam, and baptized on 30 October 1580. He received his first ship's command at the age of 30 and spent several years engaged in successful trading ventures in the Baltic and Mediterranean seas. Hartog's expedition of 1616 was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artefact to record his visit, the Hartog plate. His name is sometimes alternatively spelled Dirck Hartog or Dierick Hartochszch. Ernest Giles referred to him as Theodoric Hartog.
In 1616 Hartog gained employment with the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie VOC), and was appointed master the Eendracht (meaning "Concord" or "Unity"), in a fleet voyaging from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies.
Hartog set sail in January 1616 in the company of several other VOC ships, but became separated from them in a storm, and arrived independently at the Cape of Good Hope (later to become the site of Cape Town, South Africa). Hartog then set off across the Indian Ocean for Batavia (present-day Jakarta), utilising (or perhaps blown off course by) the strong westerly winds known as the "Roaring Forties" which had been earlier been noted by the Dutch navigator Henderik Brouwer as enabling a quicker route to Java.
On 25 October 1616, at approximately 26 degrees latitude south, Hartog and crew came unexpectedly upon "various islands, which were, however, found uninhabited." He made landfall at an island off the coast of Shark Bay, Western Australia, which is now called Dirk Hartog Island after him. His was the second recorded European expedition to land on the Australian continent, having been preceded by Willem Janszoon in 1606, but the first to do so on the western coastline.
Hartog spent three days examining the coast and nearby islands. The area was named Eendrachtsland after his ship, although that name has not endured. Before Hartog left, he affixed a pewter plate to a post, now known as the Hartog plate, on which he engraved a record of his visit to the island. Its inscription (translated from the original Dutch) read:
"1616 On 25 October arrived the ship Eendracht, of Amsterdam: Supercargo Gilles Miebais of Liege, skipper Dirch Hatichs of Amsterdam. on 27 d[itt]o. she set sail again for Bantam. Deputy supercargo Jan Stins, upper steersman Pieter Doores of Bil. In the year 1616."
The inscription on Dirk Hartog's plate
Finding nothing of interest, Hartog continued sailing northwards along this previously uncharted coastline of Western Australia, making nautical charts up to about 22 degrees latitude south. He then left the coast and continued on to Batavia, eventually arriving safely in December 1616, some five months after his expected arrival. Dirk Hartog left the employ of the VOC upon his return to Amsterdam in 1618, resuming private trading ventures in the Baltic. He died in Amsterdam in October 1621, age 41.
In 1966 and 1985 Hartog was depicted on Australian postage stamps, both depicting his ship. In 2016 the Perth Mint issued a 1 troy ounce (31 g) silver coin to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Hartog's Australian landfall. In Amsterdam, Canberra and fourteen other Australian towns, streets have been named in his honour.
The Hartog and Vlamingh plates
In 1619 Frederik de Houtman, in the VOC ship Dordrecht, and Jacob d'Edel, in another VOC ship Amsterdam, sighted land on the Australian coast near present-day Perth which they called d'Edelsland. After sailing northwards along the coast they made landfall in Eendrachtsland. In his journal, Houtman identified these coasts with Marco Polo's land of Beach, or Locach, as shown on maps of the time such as that of Petrus Plancius and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. Houtman probably sailed near Dirk Hartog Island but there is no record of him going ashore, and Hartog's plate would remain on its post undisturbed by Houtman and the many other Dutch navigators who came upon this stretch of coastline.
The inscription on Vlamingh's plate
Eighty years later, on 4 February 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh landed on the island and by chance found the Hartog plate, which lay half-buried in sand. He replaced it with a new plate which reproduced Hartog's original inscription and added notes of his own, and took Hartog's original back to Amsterdam, where it is housed in the Rijksmuseum.
Dirk Hartog's plate on display in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
In 2000 the Hartog plate was temporarily returned to Australia as part of an exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. This led to suggestions that the plate, considered important as the oldest-known written artefact from Australia's European history, should be acquired for an Australian museum, but the Dutch authorities have made it clear that the plate will remain in The Netherlands.
In 1801, the French captain of the Naturaliste, Jacques Felix Emmanuel Hamelin, second in command of an expedition led by Nicolas Baudin in the Geographe entered Shark Bay and sent a party ashore. The party found Vlamingh's plate, even though it was half buried in the sand, as the post had rotted away with the ravages of the weather. When they took the plate to the ship, Hamelin ordered it to be returned, believing its removal would be tantamount to sacrilege. He also had a plate, or plaque, of his own prepared and inscribed with details of his voyage (at 16 July 1801), adding even a small Dutch flag to the plaque. Hartog's plate was put back on its post. Where Hamelin's plate was mounted is not known, although Uranie's artist Jacques Arago, who seems to have disagreed with the removal of the plates, suggested in his account of the Uranie's visit to Shark Bay in 1818 that Freycinet might have removed it.
In 1818 in the Uranie, French explorer Louis de Freycinet, who had been an officer in Hamelin's 1801 crew, sent a boat ashore to recover Vlamingh's plate. His wife Rose de Freycinet, who was on board, having stowed away with her husband's assistance, recorded the event in what was in effect a diary of her circumnavigation. No mention of Hamelin's 1801 plate or plaque was made. One can presume that either it was not found, or that Freycinet himself took it but kept his actions secret. After the Uranie was shipwrecked in the Falkland Islands the plate and other materials from the Uranie voyage were later transferred to another ship and taken to France, where it was presented to the Academie francaise in Paris.
After being lost for more than a century, the Vlamingh plate was rediscovered in 1940 on the bottom shelf of a small room at the Academie Francaise in Paris, mixed up with old copper engraving plates. After the liberation of Paris the discovery of the plate was announced and the Australian Ambassador requested its return as a goodwill gesture.
In recognition of Australian losses in the defence of France during the two world wars, the French Ambassador to Australia presented the plate to the Prime Minister of Australia, Ben Chifley, in May 1947, who received it on behalf of the Commonwealth. In 1950 it was returned to Western Australia, where it can be seen in the Shipwrecks Galleries of the Maritime Museum in Fremantle.
Cape Inscription, Dirk Hartog Island, and replicas of the posts to which Dirk Hartog's and Willem Vlamingh's plates were nailed
The posts
The posts themselves still pose a number of queries. From the historical data it appears certain that three posts were erected at Cape Inscription (by Hartog, de Vlamingh and Hamelin), with another (by Hamelin) possibly on the north-east point or eastern coast of Dirk Hartog Island. Only two posts have been recovered from Cape Inscription and are permanent exhibits in the Shipwreck Galleries of the Western Australian Museum.These are believed to be the Rottnest Island pine (callitris) post erected by de Vlamingh and the 'oak' (de Freycinet), 'fir' (Cunningham) or 'Baltic pine' post placed by Hamelin to support the de Vlamingh plate. However, no record of any timber analyses of these posts can be located in the museum to confirm their species identification. Nor is there any record of what may have happened to the original Hartog post, reported by Cunningham and French accounts to be of oak.
Memorial posts erected by the Government of Western Australia in 1908
The 1801 French accounts of the discovery of the de Vlamingh plate and its re-erection appear to vary slightly. Whether the plate was re-attached to its existing post, or whether Hamelin had a new post made, appears debatable from the various accounts. None of them comment on whether there was more than one post at the site - as one would expect if the remains of Hartog's original post of 'oak' had still been lying around.
Archeological excavation on the posts site in 2006
In January 1822, British lieutenant Phillip Parker King anchored in Shark Bay and, having spotted the posts after rounding the Cape, found to his 'great mortification' that the p0lates had gone. King believed that they had been removed by Aborigines but later discovered that they had been taken to Paris by Freycinet. There was no sign of Hamelin's plate. King left a record of his visit in 1822 when he and Lieutenant Roe spelled out their names using nails hammered into Hamelin's post, which is also on display at the Shipwrecks Galleries in Fremantle.
Hamelin's Plaque
In October 2006, a thorough metal detector search of the entire area did not reveal any sign of the Hamelin plaque. However, since Hamelin refers to 'une feuille de plomb' - a leaf or sheet of lead - rather than 'un plat' - a plate, and Levillain refers to 'une plaque', it may mean that his memorial was not a flattened pewter plate such as the Dutch had left, but a round piece of lead, possibly sheathing lead. If this was the case, were it to have been found by someone, it could have been mistakenly overlooked as an object of significance, particularly if it had become corroded and the writing was not legible.
Memorial commemorating the 400th anniversary of Dutch explorer Dirk Hartog's landing in Western Australia on the site where the Hartog and Vlamingh plates were originally mounted on Cape Inscription, Dirk Hartog Island, Western Australia.